Towards Zero Trust Security for Prosumer-Driven Verifiable Green Energy Certificates

In response to the critical need for environmentally sustainable practices, green energy certificates have emerged as a key mechanism to prevent greenwashing and ensure the authenticity of renewable energy sources. While incorporating blockchain technology has significantly enhanced the trans-parency and verifiability of these certificates, it has also intro-duced a trade-off in terms of increased operational costs due to the added control mechanisms of the blockchain. This challenge led to recent advancements in the state-of-the-art blockchain-based framework for verifiable green energy certificates, integrating trustworthy registries to balance trust and operational efficiency to enhance feasibility for real-world deployments. Our paper extended the same framework to elevate the trust factor without incurring additional operational costs of blockchain. At the heart of our proposed solution is integrating Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), a technology that bolsters the system's reliability and empowers users/devices with control over their digital identities. By harmonizing the strengths of the Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) of IOTA with the public blockchain of Concordium, our framework maintains the integrity and transparency of the green energy certification process. It propels the system towards zero-trust security by distributing trust from a few centralized registries to many decentralized prosumer meters.